Entertainment

Shadows and Light by Diane Keaton


in Vanity gallery In 1987, Keaton told Joan Juliet Buck: “I was always religious as a child, but I had problems with Jesus early on because I couldn’t understand that there was a Son of God here on earth. I was primarily interested in religion because I wanted to go to heaven.” The longing to be somewhere else, someone else, in heaven, is the mark of the dreamer, and Keaton’s characters, like the terminally ill Bessie in “Marvin’s Room” (1996), dream of joy, a less fleeting joy of life. Pacey’s father, Marvin, has had a stroke and can’t speak, so Pacey holds a mirror up to the window to reflect the sun’s rays back to him and make him smile and feel the warmth of the heart of the world. In those moments, she’s like an older Tennessee Williams’ Laura.Glass ZooShe polishes her pieces of glass so she can watch the light play in them.

Like Laura, Keaton’s characters don’t know what to do with the attention they crave once they get it. There are actually very few love scenes in Keaton’s films, and the ones I remember seem partially obscured by darkness or clothing: in that era, insinuation was generally more interesting to filmmakers than explicit. Plus, there was her natural modesty (“I have certain opinions about my body,” she told Puck). Keaton distinguished herself in her first Broadway show, “Hair,” in 1968, not only by singing the song “Black Boys” (“Black boys are delicious, chocolate-flavored love”) but by not taking off her clothes at the end of the first show; she didn’t see the point.

In the 1980s, Keaton made several great performances about body politics. In the sensitively drawn, almost sentimental film “Shoot the Moon” (1982), directed by Alan Parker, she plays Faith Dunlap, a middle-aged woman with four young children. In the early scenes, we watch Faith getting dressed to go out, and later emotionally stripped when she realizes she no longer wants to be married to her husband, George, a writer beautifully played by Albert Finney. Shortly after her breakup with George, Faith takes in a laborer named Frank, who is building a tennis court on the couple’s property. As she and Frank sit separately in the parlor, first-date tension, hesitation, anxiety, hope, fear, and attraction fill the space between them. Frank makes a pass, and in a move that is part Faith and part Keaton, Faith steps back. But then, there’s a touch and a kiss, and you can almost hear her heartbeat under her oversized shirt: Will I get hurt? Is this love? Is it so?

Like many of Keaton’s characters, Kay, the wife of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), in Francis Ford Coppola’s three Godfather films, lives in a morally decadent world: goodness is not part of anyone’s calculations; Thinking slows things down (unless you’re thinking about how to stick it to the next person before they stick it to you). In the first film, Keaton wears a terrible wig—a hairstyle she hated—but I think her awkwardness actually helped her develop Kay’s awkwardness; Her innocence is in direct contrast to her husband’s intelligence. Just as Keaton was a wasp to Allen’s Jewishness, Kay is “white” in contrast to the darkness of the Corleones. But Keaton doesn’t overemphasize Kaye’s difference; Kay does too, and when she rebels against the Corleone family’s legacy of violence, she uses her body to take a stand, telling Michael: “I will never bring another one of your children into this world!” It is Kay’s morals that lead to her downfall, just as sensuality became a kind of downfall for Anna in The Good Mother (1988). Anna, a single mother, falls in love with an Irish sculptor (Liam Neeson) who awakens her to her body for pleasure, but even as she explores its beauty, you can see, flashing on Keaton’s face, all the doubt and fear Anna feels when her intimate partner – the ultimate stranger – shows up at her door.

Throughout her acting career, Keaton, whose creativity and diverse output has received less attention than her character — she wouldn’t know who she was if she weren’t making something — has worked on other projects. In collaboration with curator Marvin Hefferman, she has written art books based on film stills and tabloid photographs, while also producing works of her own. (payment)Reservations(Not surprisingly, Keaton was drawn to images of unusual furniture or placed at odd angles.) Her books, like documentary filmmaking—her 1987 film, Paradise, explored various ideas about the afterlife—were an extension of his love of photographs and collage, an interest she inherited from her mother, the idiosyncratic Dorothy Hall Attractive.

In 2011, Keaton published “Then againher first memoir (three more would follow). The book is beautiful for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is a kind of conversation with her mother, whose triumph in “Mrs. The Miss Los Angeles pageant when Keaton was a child was an incentive for her to get on stage herself. Incorporating selections from Dorothy’s diaries, scrapbooks, and posters into “Then Again” gave Keaton a shield to hide behind as she spoke about herself. The most harrowing part of the book concerns her body, and her struggle with bulimia. She developed this self-destructive behavior while she was in “Hair” — she had been told she would be paid more if she slimmed down — and it continued for years until she finally overcame it with the help of psychoanalysis (talk therapy, where, perhaps for the first time, Keaton invested in extratextual dialogue). In that memoir chapter, everything we feel and identify with in Keaton’s performance — the clouds that sometimes block out the sun, the goodness that can’t face itself — comes rushing back, raw and real; It’s a devastating achievement, and one of the best things I’ve read about addiction. When I got to know Keaton a little, I told her, given everything I’d learned, that she should play heroin-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill.The long day’s journey into night“One day. Her eyes widened, and she smiled as she walked away. Then Keaton, the introvert who loved to shine, the intellectual who considered himself anything but, looked back and said, ‘This everyone I need! Are you out of your mind?” ♦

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